WEBVTT
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Welcome to the National Marine Sanctuary System's
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Get Into Your Sanctuary Days.
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I'm Anne Smrcina, and I work
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for Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.
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NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary System
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consists of 14 marine protected areas
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that encompass over 600,000 square miles
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of protected waters, from New England to American Samoa,
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from the state of Washington to the Florida Keys,
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and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
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Did you know that the majority of the waters
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within the national marine sanctuaries
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are open for compatible and responsible
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recreational activities, such as whale watching,
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recreational fishing, scuba diving,
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as well as sustainable tourism
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and stewardship opportunities?
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These activities generate considerable benefits
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for local economies.
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Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is a multi-use
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multi-resource sanctuary.
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We are one of the top whale watching destinations
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in the nation, a prime fishing ground,
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and the home of many shipwrecks,
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some of historic significance.
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I'm handing the presentation now over to Ben Haskell,
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the sanctuary's deputy superintendent,
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to introduce today's program,
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and our guests, John Fish and Arne Carr,
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the shipwreck investigators who discovered the Portland.
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Thanks, Anne, and welcome to our special webinar today.
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The sanctuary is indebted to you,
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John Perry Fish and Arne Carr,
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for giving us the coordinates for our most historic
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maritime heritage resource,
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the wreck of the coastal steamship Portland.
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She provided a luxurious way to travel between
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Boston and Portland, Maine, with overnight accommodations
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and fine dining.
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She was in a class of steamers called night boats,
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that transported their passengers
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from origination to destination
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over the course of the night.
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In the case of the Portland,
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the transit from Boston to Portland
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took about 10 hours.
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The ship itself was distinctive,
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with double smokestacks, a diamond-shaped walking beam
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to move the side paddle wheels.
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The ship was designed for operation in calm waters,
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and had an essentially flat bottom,
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plus the side paddle wheels.
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This whole design and propulsion system
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was not suitable for operation in the open ocean water
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as you'd find between Boston and Portland,
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and this proved disastrous.
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Portland departed Boston at seven pm on November 26th,
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the Saturday after Thanksgiving,
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on its night run to Portland.
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Whether or not the captain received weather reports
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warning of a storm cannot be confirmed.
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What we do know is that she sank
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during the storm of the 19th century,
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which was later named the Portland Gale after the ship.
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All 192 passengers and crew,
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at least we believe that's the number
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because the passenger list went down with the ship.
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She never arrived at her destination,
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and her whereabouts became legendary.
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The mystery of Portland's loss lasted for almost a century.
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In 1989, the world found out that she had been located,
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but the depth of the find
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made it difficult for John and Arne
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to bring back photographic documentation.
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However, in 2002, the discovery was confirmed
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when a NOAA expedition went to the coordinates
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provided by our guests.
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Here's the story of how she was found.
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Today, we are getting into our sanctuary
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without getting wet, to learn more about our most famous
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and iconic shipwreck, the coastal steamship Portland,
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the Titanic of New England.
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Welcome, John and Arne.
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Thank you.
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The Portland, if I may have the next slide,
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has always intrigued us as divers, John and I,
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and also, many other divers and historians in New England.
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What happened to the Portland?
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A local well-known author in the 50s, actually the 40s,
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1940s, thought he had located the ship,
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and that was the centerpoint
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for our first attempts to search for it,
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which are depicted on this chart.
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You can see the year dates there.
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We concentrated at first in the middle, 1978.
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This was a target that this local author said,
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"This is the Portland."
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We wished to go out there and confirm it.
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Where we had side scan sonar available to us,
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this is practically what we used,
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and then we dove, if we had the ability to,
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given the depth, we did not find it there.
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But we looked elsewhere, as you can see,
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in the following years, and we spent over 11 years
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looking for the Portland.
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We were determined to try to find it.
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There's a spot on that chart
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that may be of interest to some,
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you see nodal point way over on the right,
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which shows where the wind direction was during that storm.
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This also gave us some information relative to
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where the Portland may be,
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given the wreckage that you will see shortly,
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that washed up on the Cape Cod shore.
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Next.
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The discovery, so-called discovery in the 40s
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of the Portland was very romanticized,
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and back in those years,
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everything was thought to be quite romantic,
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and a diver could open a door of a ship that sank,
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some 60 years earlier,
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but we always wondered, "What did happen to the Portland?"
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We did come across another ship,
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you'll see in the next slide,
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called the Katahdin, and it was a slightly smaller steamer.
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It left Rockland, Maine to head for Boston
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just before a storm set in.
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Once the storm set in, the waves were large enough
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that the captain knew that if he lost power,
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and turned broadside, the end would come quickly,
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with the upper works being washed off,
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and everybody would perish.
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When they got out to sea, they ran out of coal,
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and then they had a small backup of wood.
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They kept burning that to keep the boilers going
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and the steam up.
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When they ran out of that wood, they then started to
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burn furniture, and so essentially
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they were taking the ship apart.
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In the next slide, there's the same ship
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that's coming in to Portsmouth having survived the gale.
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At one point, when they ran out of furniture to burn,
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they started burning doors, inside doors,
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state room doors, and when they ran out of that
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they started to burn food.
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And they just barely managed to come back in, well,
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you could call it one piece, back into Portsmouth.
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On the next slide, I wanted to explain
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that Arne and I over the past 40 years
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developed a couple of databases.
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The database, actually two different ones,
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one is the database of historical sinkings,
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and that's a situation where we know exactly what it was,
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but we don't know exactly where it was.
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The other database is a database
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of obstructions on the seafloor,
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in those cases we know exactly where it is,
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but we don't know what it is.
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And by merging these two databases,
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we can find an obstruction and a historical sinking,
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that might be very close to one another,
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in which case we can investigate those occurrences.
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In the next slide you can see that this database continues
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up to the north into Maine and all the way down south
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to the New York, New Jersey border.
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And each one of these yellow labeled tags
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is something that needs to be investigated
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to determine what it is.
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As you can see on this slide,
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there are a number of data points,
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which interested us, and we had to eliminate them.
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Some we eliminated purely by saying
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"It's probably too small,"
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although initially when we really looked for the Portland,
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where it was down, we thought, near Cape Cod,
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it could very well have broken up into pieces,
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hence we spent much more time,
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and this involved years, as you can see,
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as far as searching.
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As we got more north, we concentrated more on the large
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shipwrecks or hangs in the area
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that are depicted again by yellow here.
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The next slide, you can see that not only
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did we have those two databases, but we have a record
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of exactly where things were found, just after the storm,
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the things that were found what relate to the Portland.
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The next slide shows a blowup of the eastern side,
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and you can see some of the things that have come ashore
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with the times that they were located.
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Not necessarily the time they came ashore,
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but the time the lifesaving men
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walking the beach had found them.
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The lower left, the ice cream cans and the life jackets
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were some of the first things to come ashore,
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because they have high windage.
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Things that are submerged deeper in the water
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are more affected by current,
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but the empty ice cream cans and life jackets
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would have a lot of windage, so would come ashore first.
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And we logged all these locations
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in an effort to determine where the Portland,
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where she's finally resting.
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On the next slide, you can see that we continue
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with this database down as far as Chatham,
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not shown in this slide,
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and the time of things found
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based on the time we thought she might have sank.
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One of the clues that we had,
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after looking all around the cape, was some of the research
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that was in the Boston Globe.
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This is a December 1898 article,
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talking about a watch that had stopped at 9:19.
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There were other watches found,
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and they were stopped in similar times,
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so we didn't know if the watches were stopped
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because they crashed into a state room wall,
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or they were stopped by immersion.
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The next slide shows work that we did
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consulting with Dr. Dick Limeburner
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at Woods Hole Oceanographic.
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He's an expert in hind-testing debris
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from where it was found back to where it started,
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and he said to us,
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"If the ship isn't where you think it is,"
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and I said "Dick, we have covered
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every square meter of this area off the cape."
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He said "Then you need to assume
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that the watch had stopped 12 hours earlier."
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So we backtracked up, and started working north,
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we worked north very systematically,
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and another clue that we had
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was six months after the Portland sank,
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the next slide you can see it was reported that
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wreckage was located, well, well to the north.
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So this supported Dick's concept
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that it didn't sink in the evening,
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it sank early that morning.
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On the next slide, you can see some of the things
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that were found were actually verified
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by carpenters who built them
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and installed them on the Portland.
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Although there were many skeptics about these reports,
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the evidence came to light when Dick told us to look north.
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The next slide shows that the sea captain
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actually put an x on the chart.
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This chart is tilted to the west.
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It normally would be turned 90 degrees to the right,
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but that gave us more confidence that we would be looking
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up to the north.
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On the next slide, you can see the areas that we covered.
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We didn't go straight up to the north,
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to where we thought it might be,
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because we weren't sure about those watches.
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So we simply worked our way north, slowly and surely.
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We found lots of schooners, the Paul Palmer,
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and many other schooners that the NOAA sanctuary people
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have investigated and thoroughly documented.
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One was a couple of schooners that sank after a collision.
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Next slide, please.
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The Louise B Crary and the Frank A Palmer,
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around 1902 were traveling north from Virginia up to Boston
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with 3000 tons of coal each.
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Both these schooners are about 300 feet long,
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and think of a football field.
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They were pretty lengthy, pretty sizeable.
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When we first came upon them with side scan sonar,
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given their size, we thought "Hey, the Portland!"
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But in reality, we didn't know where these schooners sank
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because the crew had abandoned ship into a lifeboat
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and were about five or six days in that lifeboat.
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The survivors picked up later, and again,
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this was December of the year,
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so it wasn't too good for the crew.
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We looked at these, we saw that they were bow to bow
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in collision on the bottom, still intact on the bottom,
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and first looking at them, given the size,
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that's what was thought "Ah, the Portland."
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And maybe the Portland had succumbed to a collision.
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But in reality, as you look at these a little bit more,
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they don't look like the steamer Portland.
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The superstructure isn't there,
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the engine and the walking beam aren't there.
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But boy, these two were, as far as we were concerned,
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a very exciting find.
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In the next slide, you can see that the machinery
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on paddle wheel steamers was massive.
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The walking beam up at the top,
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the diamond shaped mechanical connection
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between the engine and the paddle wheel,
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they're massive iron objects,
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weighing up to 40 tons; probably the Portland
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might've weighed a little less,
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but you can see that the A-frame made of wood,
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that supports that massive walking beam,
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is very, very strong structure,
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and unlikely to have been collapsed
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during any kind of sinking.
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And the next slide, you can see the man there,
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this is a Straits of Magellan shipwreck
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of a paddle wheel steamer, and the circled item
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at the lower left is actually
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the shape of a man leaning over.
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So we were confident that the two schooners,
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turned out to be two schooners, weren't the Portland,
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and we just continued to march north
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until we found a shipwreck with structure.
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Next slide.
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John first mentioned, in one of the earlier slides
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showing charts and different yellow figures there,
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that we were working on two databases,
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and we've done that quite successfully.
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So successful that we were able to find the Portland.
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We have to thank one of those databases, fishermen.
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In this particular case, fisherman from Gloucester
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that provided us hangs around Stellwagen Bank,
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that while they were fishing, they might hang into it
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and tear up a net.
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And they categorized these hangs every once in a while
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by being large or small.
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Large ones of course really wrecking a net
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or capturing a net.
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So again, we thank a lot of the fishermen of Massachusetts
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for this information, which really helped us.
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Okay, Ben?
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Yeah, thank you John and Arne
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for telling that incredible story,
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and for spending so much of your time
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searching for the Portland.
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It was in 2001, after hearing that the Portland
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was likely in the sanctuary, I asked John and Arne
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if they would reveal the coordinates, and they agreed.
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In 2002, I organized a mission with the help
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of the National Undersea Research Center
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at the University of Connecticut,
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that was dedicated to confirming and documenting the wreck.
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With the initial side scan sonar image,
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we were able to show that this was, in fact,
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the fabled lost ship.
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Note the amount of fishing gear
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strung over and along the shipwreck.
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During that same expedition,
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we were able on the very first pass
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to image the wrecks of the Frank A Palmer
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and Louise B Crary, the two coal schooners
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Arne spoke about.
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John and Arne gave us the coordinates for this site, too.
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It was one of the locations they surveyed
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and ruled out in their search for the Portland.
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In 2003, we went out with The Science Channel
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to film a documentary, and were able to bring back
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supporting photographs and video
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that gave evidence of the grand style of the vessel
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as illustrated by these dinner plates and cups
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that survived the plummet to the sea floor.
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And in 2019, the sanctuary began a two year project
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to further document the wreck,
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and develop a virtual 3D model of the Portland.
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Here we see marine life growing on the remains
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of the side paddle wheel.
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We were also able to broadcast directly from the site,
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to schools and indirectly via the internet,
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so that the public could tune in to the live shows.
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In 2020 this year, we will be continuing the mission
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with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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and Marine Imaging Technologies
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to further document the wreck and reveal its secrets.
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Visit our expedition website here.
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And I'll turn it back over to Anne at this point.
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Well thank you everyone, for participating today.
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While the Get Into Your Sanctuary events
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are being held virtually this year
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in response to health and safety concerns due to COVID-19,
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the sanctuary waters have remained open
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for responsible use, in accordance with CDC guidelines
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and your local regulations.
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For more information, NOAA's response to the COVID issues
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can be found at sanctuaries.noaa.gov/coronavirus.
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If you get a chance to experience
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a national marine sanctuary, though,
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please share your photos on social media,
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and use the hashtags
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#ILoveMySanctuary and #RecreateResponsibly.
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Don't forget to check out our annual photo contest,
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that's open until Labor Day this year,
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which is September 7th.
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Also, with your participation in today's program
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you've earned a virtual Stellwagen Bank
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National Marine Sanctuary badge.
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You can go to the park passport app to download it.
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And please join us at the top of the hour
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for our next sanctuary adventure.
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It's Channel Island National Marine Sanctuary's
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00:20:22.557 --> 00:20:25.137
"A Revival of Maritime Culture."
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And continue for the rest of the weekend
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to hear about the great things you can do and see
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in your National Marine Sanctuaries.
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And you can plan a visit at our website,
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sanctuaries.noaa.gov/visit/giys.html.
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Thank you for participating.